Courtesy: AP-Yonhap

• COVID-19 has pushed more people to pick up digital devices for work, study etc.
• Digital literacy rate rose to 50.1% in 2020 from 46% in 2019
• But computer literacy rate only edged up by 1.5% to 32.3%

While computer literacy hasn’t reached a third of the population in Sri Lanka, the COVID-19 pandemic has given the country’s digital literacy a push with people picking up digital devices to connect with each other, work, study and entertain themselves while staying at home. 

The ability of a person between the ages of 5 and 69 to use a computer, laptop, tablet or a smartphone on their own without outside support is defined as digital literacy and it is measured as a percentage of the population in the same age bracket. 

In Sri Lanka, this rate reached 50.1 percent by the end of 2020 compared to 32.3 percent computer literacy rate, according to the latest survey on computer literacy by the Department of Census and Statistic. 

This is also a jump from 46 percent digital literacy rate in 2019.

In comparison, the computer literacy, which requires a bit more sophistication and perhaps a little training, rose only by 1.5 percentage points from 2019. 

Some low-income households could only afford a smartphone to ensure that their children receive their daily dose of online schooling when the pandemic deprived them of classroom learning for 
over a year. 

With the so-called new normal brought in by the pandemic, people were seen increasingly investing in computers, laptops, tabs and smartphones to work-from-home. 

Even after the end of the pandemic, it is now being predicted that the world work would largely remain a hybrid one, as employers have also realised the operational savings such an arrangement 
could bring in. 

According to the bi-annual survey, every one in five households in Sri Lanka has either a desktop or a laptop computer and this hasn’t changed much during the last four years from a range of 22 percent to 23 percent. 

Nevertheless a prolonged pandemic could provide a reason for more households to own computers as they provide convenience in terms of distant learning and work-from-home arrangements. 

The highest computer ownership is in the Western Province with 35.1 percent of the households having a computer while the lowest of 11.9 percent is in the Uva Province in 2020. 

Further the urban population demonstrates higher computer and digital literacy than the rural and estate community, the survey results found.